Interview by Carmen Paddock, courtesy of Scottish Opera

Staging the company premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's 2003 opera Ainadamar, about Federico García Lorca as told by his friend Margarita Xirgu, is a thrilling project for LA Opera. Ainadamar might seem different from the older operas presented this season, but Golijov thinks its heart is the same. “I wanted people to walk out whistling a tune or two from the opera. I really wanted to create memorable arias." That said, there will be some unusual sound effects alongside the orchestra. “I use a horse gallop on cobblestone, the bullet, water, and cante jondo—what people call flamenco but it’s actually deep song from Andalusia sung by the Roma people. It’s completely not operatic but very operatic.” Some of these sounds start as literal representations before morphing into a more abstract, expressive vein. “The gunshot becomes a dance, almost like a flamenco dance,” Golijov says. With internationally renowned choreographer and director Deborah Colker at the helm of this production, LA Opera audiences can expect striking movement to accompany the music. Lastly, Golijov says, water had to be used—the Fuente Grande, known also as Aynadamar or the Fountain of Tears, is central to this history. “In the Middle Ages, the Arab poets of Andalusia used to write poems to this fountain,” he explains. “It was a place of love, and then eight centuries later the greatest poet Spain ever created was killed there. Lorca was one of the first victims in the Spanish Civil War.”

Golijov’s affinity for Lorca goes to childhood. “When I was growing up in Argentina, everyone knew some Lorca poems by heart. He’s so alive. He doesn’t get old, he doesn’t age. There is something that transcends his time—not only in his art but in his persona. Everything he did was from love and with absolute freedom.” Is there a responsibility when portraying historical figures? Not a strict one, he says. “It’s a responsibility of being open and being true. I try to never lose sight of [Lorca and Xirgu’s] humanity and not make them symbols. It’s a problem when things become symbols.” Lorca himself addresses this in his play Mariana Pineda, about a 19^th-century woman who was executed after refusing to betray her revolutionary coconspirators. Her statue stands in Granada, near Lorca’s boyhood home, and Xirgu’s performance of Lorca’s play forms the opera’s framing story. “Lorca’s aim when he wrote Mariana Pineda was to make her a person in love, not a statue. So what I did with Lorca is what he did with Mariana Pineda. I think Che Guevara wanted to be a statue and, unfortunately, he ended up on T-shirts! But this opera and Lorca’s play go back to that person who was heroic from love, not from carrying a flag.”

 Interpretation opens new possibilities; in Ainadamar, Lorca is sung by a woman. Golijov was initially not going to include Lorca as a character, but mezzo-soprano Kelly O’Connor, who created the role in 2003, changed his mind before the premiere. “She had this extraordinarily dusky androgynous voice, and then I looked at her picture and she has the same eyebrows as Lorca,” says Golijov. “I didn’t do it with an ideological purpose.” Now, Daniela Mack plays Lorca for LA Opera. Despite the happily accidental nature of this choice, cross-gender casting allows its own freedoms. “In [Lorca’s] aria to the statue of Mariana Pineda, I wanted the singer to start super low, and then she starts going higher and higher. It questions what is male, what is female.”

Ainadamar   has been compared to a passion play, but Golijov sees a distinctly Spanish twist. “I think Lorca is like a tree that comes from the soil of Spain, and that same soil eventually swallows it. Spain has such a dichotomy—they have this revolutionary spirit of freedom, of Lorca, Dali, Buñuel and the cante jondo. At the same time, Spain has this repression that is still in place today up to a point. Something brilliant can emerge from that conflict but can also be killed.”

Death is a constant in Lorca’s work, but the juxtaposition with an active, extraordinarily sensitive choice to live life fully is where his legacy will always resonate. “Lorca is a call to be alive, even if death is around the corner. He is all life with extraordinary sensitivity, always wide awake,” Golijov says. “And cante jondo is mostly about the presence of death. Lorca said ‘a dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere else in the world.’ It’s not like in other cultures where the worlds of the living and of the dead are separate.” These themes are baked into the opera. “Margarita is about to die—the opera happens in just one minute, but she relives everything. Lorca is more alive than anybody actually alive around her. When I was a child, my great-grandmother was very old. She had lost three children. At some point in our conversations, I realized that those children of whom she was talking were more alive than I was.”

In opera terms, Ainadamar is young. Is there a temptation to keep shaping it? “I think that the key for any creator is to forget,” Golijov counters. “Remember things you have not put into music before but forget what you already did, and I’m pretty good at that,” he adds with a laugh, noting that Ainadamar is now over 20 years old. “It’s almost like somebody who was very close to me wrote it. There is a time just after you write when you want to make improvements. But at some point, the piece becomes itself. That doesn’t mean it is perfect. Some pieces will limp, or have some other oddity, but they are themselves. I say, ‘I love you how you are, good luck to you, I hope you have a long life, and bye!’